Teaching Syrian Students in Turkish Schools: Experiences of Teachers

Abstract

The Syrian civil war affected Turkey so much that approximately three and a half million Syrians live in Turkey. Ministry of Education implemented an inclusive approach to schooling of Syrian asylum-seekers' children by educating them in public schools with their Turkish peers in the same classrooms in 2016 in order to address their educational needs, integration into the Turkish culture, and to prevent generation gap. Education, as a basic human right and as a way of integration into the Turkish society, is provided for free at all levels of education in Turkey. The inclusion of Syrian students in the Turkish school environment is quite a new experience for Turkish teachers and if the inclusion process is not managed properly, it may have negative effects on both students and their teachers. The purpose of this phenomenological study was to explore the experiences of teachers teaching Syrian students in the city of Kilis, where the number of asylum-seekers outnumbered the local population and almost one-fifth of the students in public schools are Syrians. The guiding question of this research was "What are the lived experiences of primary and middle school teachers educating Syrian children in culturally inclusive classrooms?" Five teachers from four different primary and middle schools were interviewed. The six open-ended interview questions allowed the participants to reflect on their experiences. The data were collected during the spring semester of 2017. The interviews were analyzed according to thematic methods. Three themes emerged: language barrier, lack of family support, and teachers' lack of pedagogical skills to teach asylum-seeker students.

Sosyal Bilgiler Öğretmenlerinin Gözünden Sınıflarındaki Suriyeli Öğrenciler

“…These teachers stated that Syrian students have an insufficient vocabulary and conceptual repertoire, start school without knowing Turkish, and encounter problems due to the difference between the alphabets, and, in general, their inability to speak Turkish. This result matches different research findings (Miller, 2009;Sarıtaş et al, 2016;Biçer and Kılıç, 2017;Keskinkılıç Kara et al, 2017;Erdem, 2017;Bulut et al, 2018;Kiremit et al, 2018;Şahin and Doğan, 2018;Yaşar and Amaç, 2018). For instance, the findings obtained by Bulut et al (2018) revealed that teachers implement the same curriculum for the refugee children whose mother tongue is not Turkish and the children whose mother tongue is Turkish and they do not know how to address such problems since they have not received any training on it.…”

“…Teachers have an important part in the education process and constitute the most affected group searching for solutions. Studies (Aykırı, 2017;Erdem, 2017;Keskinkılıç Kara et al, 2017;Biçer and Kılıç, 2017;Bulut et al, 2018;Kiremit et al, 2018;Şahin and Doğan, 2018;Yaşar and Amaç, 2018) highlight that teachers face various problems during this process. For example, the prominent problems identified in the study carried out by Yaşar and Amaç (2018) are language barrier, lace of family support, and lack of teachers' knowledge and skills concerning refugee students.…”

“…Studies (Aykırı, 2017;Erdem, 2017;Keskinkılıç Kara et al, 2017;Biçer and Kılıç, 2017;Bulut et al, 2018;Kiremit et al, 2018;Şahin and Doğan, 2018;Yaşar and Amaç, 2018) highlight that teachers face various problems during this process. For example, the prominent problems identified in the study carried out by Yaşar and Amaç (2018) are language barrier, lace of family support, and lack of teachers' knowledge and skills concerning refugee students. At the end of this study, five themes concerning the problems the social studies teachers encounter with Syrian refugee students and five themes concerning the solution proposals pertaining thereto were obtained.…”

“…There is a limited number of studies focusing on how teachers react when there are refugee or asylum seeker students in their class (Arnot, Pinson, Candappa, 2009). Some of the studies found in the literature (Aykırı, 2017;Biçer and Kılıç, 2017;Bulut, Kanat Sosyal and Gülçiçek, 2018;Erdem, 2017;Keskinkılıç Kara and Şentürk Tüysüzer, 2017;Kiremit, Akpınar and Tüfekçi Akcan, 2018;Miller, 2009;Özer, Komsuoğlu and Ateşok, 2016;Şahin and Doğan, 2018;Topkaya and Akdağ, 2016;Yaşar and Amaç, 2018) deal with the problems teachers have in addition to different crucial partners in education. In their study, Özer et al (2016) emphasize that education needs to be considered a "right" rather than a public service offered to citizens and the education policies for the Syrian refugee children must adopt an individual-oriented perspective instead of a problem-oriented and short-term perspective.…”

Experiences of Pre-service Teachers about Educating Disadvantaged Students: Challenges and Opportunities

“…Araştırmanın yapıldığı şehir, kendi nüfusu kadar Suriyeli sığınmacı barındıran örnek bir şehirdir. Sığınmacıların çocukları, MEB bünyesindeki okullarda Türk akranlarıyla birlikte eğitim almakta ve Türkçeyi henüz yeterince öğrenemedikleri için bazı zorluklar yaşamaktadırlar (Yaşar ve Amaç, 2017). Bu öğrencilerin birçoğu, öğretmenleri tarafından desteğe ihtiyaç duyan öğrenciler olarak nitelendirilmiş ve proje kapsamında öğretmen adaylarından dil ve diğer akademik konularda destek almışlardır.…”